‘I know the feeling’ : About Lucas

Writing is less about writing than it is a spiritual desire to explore emotion and humanity

You’d be the best writer in the world and never need to put down a single line

I worry I’ve lost it Lucas

Like every day

I think that’s the thing with every creative pursuit though, every time we make something we think it’s a fluke and that it will never happen again

But it’s the other way round, you don’t have a choice, you cant switch it off, you’ll always be that thing whether you like it or not

And I fully believe that anxiety/depression is a by-product of an abundance of creativity because our minds are on a 1000 all the time. And fuck me we know we can’t just switch that off

I think a bit of it is that I’ve actually had like real life shit go on that I haven’t been able to contemplate enough or distance myself from enough to wrap into cute little word packages

So maybe one day I’ll write gut-wrenching poems about this but at the minute they only wrench my gut you know

100%

Yeah man some shit is too raw

It has to fade a little and then you can kind of -not romanticise it – but something like that

Is that what we do by making art out of sad things? Romanticise things? I guess so

Maybe not even romanticise, I think for the creator its more of an attempt to get something good out of it

Maybe creators are all closet optimists

Hmmmm I agree

It’s healing

I wonder if I’ve downplayed the level to which making music/writing has saved me from ACTUAL madness

I always think that about your work, maybe because of our conversations

Like its so beautiful and articulate and then there’s a line that’s like BRUTAL and I’m like ow I hope Lucas is okay

You’re so talented at being on that line between relatability and personalism

Hahaha I was thinking that myself the other there’s a song on the new EP that’s like SERIOUSLY me dealing with some shit but its wrapped in a bop

And I was like

Issssss this healthy?… let’s hope

That’s really kind of you to say and means a lot, thank you

Big mood

Feel that

In general it’s a strange thing. Like because you wrap it up in pretty paper, we’re happy to send our deeeep daaark personal emotions out into the world

It’s a magical thing though, that the world has birthed that

Even more magical to have friendships like this were we rarely actually talk about that stuff, but its enough that we share our work. It probably says it more honestly than if you were just like hi lucy this is going on and this is how I feel about it

Oh absolutely

Absofuckkkkkenlutely

I think that’s why we’ve been friends for like 4/5 years and only met once, because it’s way more genuine to be like here’s something I made that represents all the parts of who I am

Without having to navigate the social politeness to get to the deeper stuff

And our friendship was builttt on that, like day 1, deep dive

Hahaha ennit

—

I remember the night I first talked to Lucas Jones vividly. At around 2am, we both recommended each other the same song at the same time, and we’ve been connected since, two taureans, two writers, certainly soulmates somewhere along our timeline of lives.

Ours is a friendship rooted almost exclusively in our work. In the years we’ve known each other, we’ve met only once when I wandered half-cut into his gig, but we’ve shared maybe the most intimate moments of our lives with each other; laying our fears and pain at each other’s feet as poems and songs, rarely discussing the motivations. Rarely talking beyond ‘can I send you the new song?’, ‘could you read this for me?’, but we know each other, maybe closer than most others.

And though probably biased, Lucas is my favourite artist. He has a way of articulate his place in the world, tied between a purely ecstatic celebration of emotion, shouting out in praise of pain and love and anything given to us by living; and anger, questioning the state of things. He dives deep into everything, analysing every experience, cross-referencing it within the context of his life and further, and threading it together in a way only a prodigy could do. Writing it with a blessed pen, singing it out as another way to praise.

His new song Blush is no different which Lucas introduced to me as ‘essentially me having an existential crisis (WHAT A SHOCK)’. We’ve always been connected by our hearts, managing to stumble across someone with emotions are sharp and soft as our own, we’ve talked a lot about what it means. We’ve stayed up into the early morning hunched over phones and pulling apart our thoughts and feelings, begging each other for conclusions, do I love that boy? Do I feel this way because of A or B? Is this ever going to be a good thing or will it always hurt? Am I even a writer? That’s what I hear in Blush, Lucas trying to figure out what inside him is real and actualised, and what is just his emotions, stolen by his imagination. ‘I know the feeling’ becomes the conclusion, a cry that he doesn’t know what it means, whether it’s real, or where it comes from, but he knows it well, feeling it for certain. He spirals through the spectrum of emotion from screaming highs to weeping lows, and the conclusion is that. I don’t know why, but I know I feel it.

Knowing Lucas is a privilege. The world is lucky for getting a piece of his art, a gift that I don’t doubt will blossom and boom. But getting to know a piece of his soul, hear the thoughts, see the reasoning; is a blessing, and not just because I can brag about it when he’s famous. Each song I hear or poem I read, I feel I’m catching up with my friend, we’re working through the problems and feelings, combing through the mess, finding a path through. I never ask what or who they’re about, I only ask about the thought process behind it.

It’s a rare thing to have a friendship built like this. When we speak, we slip because to the 60s, to New York, to the Chelsea Hotel, to our own coterie, writing to each other in poems, hearing each other’s news in song. But it’s a beautiful thing we’ve built, and by ‘we’ I mean every creative, falling into and making their own little communities built in this way, in respect and admiration first. It’s a beautiful thing to see the merit in his work first, seeing the glorious crafting, then see him in it. In blush, I first see a perfectly done music video, complete with the complexity of real-world connections and the merging of lives in love. I then see Lucas, all the conversations we’ve had about the feeling, all the heartbreaks and the excitement of the newness of love. But first, always the poem, always the song. Work first, us later. The blessing of building from art; admiration into friendship.